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The year in review: CanLit is dead, long live CanLit

This is the year CanLit changed. It was the year the dumpster fire was reduced to smoulders. When Indigenous writers were embraced. When our international recognition increased. It’s also the year we bought fewer homegrown books and where authors in this country saw their earnings drop below $10,000 a year.

Which is to say, it was a year of tension and transition, almost always the necessary setting for exciting things to happen.

That tension was reflected in bestsellers lists and book prizes alike. Both included established faces and ideas but also began to reflect a new face of CanLit, one more inclusive of multiple generations, genders, backgrounds, experiences and voices.

So bestsellers included Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life, alongside Rupi Kaur’s The Sun and her Flowers and Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers.

The most exciting development is how Indigenous writers led the way in showing how their stories can appeal to a wide range of readers.

Tanya Tagaq, internationally known for her throat singing, released her gut-punch of a book, Split Tooth, about a girl growing up in Nunavut; CBC host Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, released in October, explored what happens when a society is devastated by catastrophe and struggles to restore itself.

The Griffin Poetry Prize went to Billy-Ray Belcourt, the youngest ever winner of the $65,000 prize, for his collection This Wound Is a World. He’s a gay Indigenous poet from the Driftpile First Nation Nakisonowin, putting paid to any idea that only more established or white voices get all the attention.

The groundswell began last year with two books by Indigenous writers: Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers andCherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, the latter of which continued on the bestsellers list for pretty much the entirety of 2018 — clearly it’s not just Indigenous readers who are buying it. It won awards in Canada and the U.S. (the $50,000 Kirkus prize) and is being read around the world because it has something authentic to say about societies being annihilated and where hope lies for the future.

In a memorable moment, it was also defended strongly by Jully Black on the 2018 Canada Reads competition; in a dramatic exchange with TV personality Jeanne Beker (who defended the ultimate winner, Mark Sakamoto’s Forgiveness) Black called into question the type of books we’re ready to read: ones about forgiving the past or ones about challenging injustices that are still going on.

On the nonfiction side, Talaga’s book, her look at the deaths of Indigenous young people in Thunder Bay, continued to spark conversations across the country about how Indigenous people are treated. Thousands of interested readers came out to hear her talk for the book as well as her Massey Lecture, All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward — a title for this year if ever there was one. There was also Terese Marie Mailhot’s searing memoir Heart Berries, which made headlines on both sides of the 49th parallel.

“There’s a lot of pent-up energy that has suddenly found publishers willing to publish (these stories),” notes Nick Mount, a professor of English at the University of Toronto and author of Arrival: The story of CanLit. “Northrop Frye used to say that … poetry proceeds from an activity that is blocked and, in the Indigenous community, God knows there are a lot of things that are blocked. Like access to clean water.”

The books, certainly, bring up sometimes difficult issues — abuse, addiction, racism — but they’ve opened up a dialogue, and readers have been listening and joining in.

If there was a book of the year, it had to be Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. It was nominated for awards around the world: the Man Booker Prize in the U.K., the Carnegie Medal in the U.S., the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize in Canada, ultimately winning the Giller Prize — making Edugyan only the third writer in that honour’s 25-year history to win it twice, and she did so for back-to-back books.

Vivek Shraya, a transgender woman of colour, also created waves: showing up not only in the Star’s coverage and in other major Canadian outlets, but in Vanity Fair and the New York Times. Her book I’m Afraid of Men, an emotional and sometimes painful memoir about how masculinity was imposed on her when she was a boy, helped establish her as a real cultural powerhouse.

On a local level, the nominees for the Toronto Book Award — won by David Chariandy — were the most diverse in its 44-year history, representing a variety of ethnicities. While much of the media, and indeed the prize itself, commented on the diversity of its short list, poet Dionne Brand asked the question “diverse from what?” It’s a sign, perhaps, that the word should be dropped from the lexicon: these are the books we read, they make up our oeuvre, no need to set them apart as different; they’re simply Canadian.

The Festival of Literary Diversity — coming again in May to Brampton — grew again in 2018, getting major sponsorship from Audible for the first time. Amanda Leduc, who does the FOLD’s communications, says that while more people are paying attention, and while publishers are coming up with more diverse catalogues and lineups, “we still run into instances where (people) felt like they’re put on the ‘diversity panel’ and being tokenized.” Seeing diversity as a trend and not as an entrenched part of the community. The change is happening, but we’ve still got a way to go.

Despite the increase in other voices, CanLit continues to refer almost exclusively to English-speaking writers. But a new wave of translations from Quebec has been grabbing our attention: Eric DuPont’s Songs for the Cold of Heart, shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and Catherine Leroux’s Madame Victoria, which was internationally reviewed and praised, being just two of them.

All to say 2018 has marked a year where established Canadian writers and new voices finally began to stand shoulder to shoulder. CanLit is breaking out of the idea that it includes one type of writer, telling one of a clichéd number of stories. The kind of Canadian literary nationalism that began in the 1960s is finally making way to include Canadians of all stripes.

CanLit is dead, long live CanLit.

If one person represents the divide of the then and the now it’s Margaret Atwood. In 2018 she was at the centre of everything: the bestseller lists with her 30-year-old book The Handmaid’s Tale and its ratings behemoth TV adaptation, one that resonates with a new generation in an era of eroding human and women’s rights.

She also represents old CanLit, that brand that came of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s when the federal government was encouraging our nation’s storytellers, and literary journals and small presses were able to get funding and publish new, fresh voices.

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But 50 years later, they’re being challenged by fresher, newer voices. And the tension’s been palpable.

That tension is maybe starkest in the controversy over the University of British Columbia’s handling of allegations against its former creative writing chair, Steven Galloway.

That episode caused 2017 to be called a “CanLit dumpster fire,” while 2018 began with Atwood’s essay in the Globe and Mail titled “Am I A Bad Feminist?” that touched on both the Galloway case and the #MeToo movement in general. Atwood said she was upholding due process for both Galloway and his accusers, but younger writers felt that she was upholding a system that discouraged younger women in particular from speaking out against the patriarchy.

Perhaps Jen Sookfong Lee summed it up best on the website Open Book, where she wrote in response to Atwood’s piece: “The division in CanLit has never been clearer. There are those who have benefited greatly from the old inequities in Canadian publishing and seem terrified that those benefits are waning, and who cling to a concept of writerly freedom that disintegrates when they are forced to consider the writing of the critics who engage with their work with a political eye.”

As 2018 went on, Galloway received a settlement from UBC and subsequently launched a lawsuit against 20 or so people for defamation.

I appreciate the way Hazel Millar, a publisher at Book*hug, put it in a conversation we had. The house published a book called Refuse: CanLit in Ruins, of essays mostly from the said younger generation that Millar hoped would contribute to spark dialogue. There are lots of puns on that first word in the title: refuse as in “we will not change”; refuse as garbage (perhaps that stuff being lit in the dumpster fire); or “refuse the industry; our own preferred is ‘How do we give it a bit of a spark again?’” That’s a bit more hopeful, something many of us probably need right now.

While we might have spent some of 2018 finding our way through CanLit controversies, it doesn’t mean we’re buying the books. The state of our country’s book sales caused enough concern that a group of booksellers, publishers, librarians, a few former arts executives and one media executive (formerly of the CBC) got together in a group called More Canada and spent the year looking at the state of the industry.

It wasn’t good news.

Publishers across the country produce 3,500 Canadian-authored titles every year. In 2005, those books would have accounted for 26 per cent of book purchases. This year, they account for only 13 per cent of books purchased: a drop of half.

“Supply is strong; awareness and readership are weak,” they concluded. One of the reasons is that Canadians aren’t sure whether the book they’re reading is by a Canadian or not. Part of this is a byproduct of online retailing, where sellers such as Amazon recommend U.S. titles rather than Canadian ones. In addition, the decline of book reviews in many mainstream newspapers added to the problem.

If the late 1960s saw Canadian literature as necessary and desired, the rise of online retailing has seen borders blur again.

That concern was reflected in real terms in a study from the Writers’ Union of Canada, released in October, which showed Canadian authors make less than ever from their writing alone: $9,380, down from $12,879 just four years ago. To be sure, that’s following a trend around the world (the U.K. also came out with a study showing that authors incomes fell about 15 per cent since 2013). But lower book sales hurt writers.

The Writers’ Union has also spent the year taking part in Ottawa’s Canadian Heritage standing committee looking at how writers and others in creative industries are compensated. They want the government to take another look at the Copyright Act, which the union says is at least partially responsible for the erosion of author payments, particularly in “the vast amounts of uncompensated copying that occurs in educational settings.”

John Degen, the union’s executive director, pointed out that the industry is changing in other ways, particularly in how writers publish.

“(There) is very little mental distinction between traditional publishing and self-publishing,” he said. “(It’s) all about being in control of your work and career. I see an awful lot more jumping between the two paths of publication.”

Both reports point to the need for new ways forward for writers as individuals and the industry as a whole.

Looking forward to 2019 we can anticipate even more diverse voices making a splash: Ian Williams and Alicia Elliott are just two writers kicking off the year with new books (and they’re already being watched south of the border).

There’s a big book fair every year in Frankfurt. It’s the kind of event where book deals are signed, booksellers around the world are shown the best and the brightest, where excitement is stirred for the best new titles. Each year they feature one country to spotlight. In 2020, that’s Canada.

So if 2018 was a year where a transition from old CanLit to new CanLit really started to roll, and 2019 keeps that momentum going, in 2020 a new national voice will be ready to shine on the world stage.

Deborah Dundas is the Star’s Books editor. She is based in Toronto. Follow her on Twitter: debdundas

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